I served a long apprenticeship. I started writing as a child, and sold my first story at 35. Ten years later I was a full-time pro. In the last 30 years I have written everything from TV drama to company histories, novels to wedding speeches. My latest project? A stage musical. So this blog is a record of one jobbing writer's never-ending attempts to keep the wolf from the door.

On of the growing collection of books about my experiences in Nebraska and the Great Plains

Available on amazon

Who is Alan Wilkinson?

I live in Durham, England. I have made a living as a writer since the early 1990s. For twenty years I earned my bread and butter ghosting biographies, writing corporate histories and doing TV work - anything that would pay the bills. But my main literary and historical interests lie in the American West. I have made close to twenty major road trips out there, criss-crossing the region from north to south and east to west. I have lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I studied writing under Chicano author Rudy Anaya, also in Taos. In 2011 I spent six months alone on a cattle ranch in the Nebraska Sandhills, where I wrote The Red House On The Niobrara.

My 1994 bike ride across Nebraska is the subject of 'There Used To Be A Guy... But He Died.'

It was a 5000-mile road-trip from Mexico to Canada and back which gave me the material for Between the Rockies and a Hard Place.

In April 2017 my first novel, Cody, The Medicine Man and Me, was published by Ouen Press - and was acclaimed by Rudy Anaya "A real prize winner. Compelling story characters."

My next western travel book will be about a trip up the Lewis and Clark Trail.

Six months on a cattle ranch in the Nebraska Sandhills

Blizzards, locusts, gully-washers, rattlesnakes, round-ups... I had them all in my 6-month stay in a tumbledown hunting lodge on the western Great Plains. So slap a T-bone steak on the camp-fire, pull up a log, and read on....

For the full story of my writing career visit my website: http://www.alan-wilkinson.co.uk/